The day is finally here, the day that the GNOME team releases GNOME 3.0, the first major revision of the GNOME project since 2002. Little of GNOME 2.x is left in GNOME 3.0, and as such, you could call it GNOME's KDE4. We're living in fortunate times, what, with two wildly divergent open source desktops.

You don't have to use Gnome Shell, IMO it's going to be as successful as "New Coke". Anyway with Gnome Shell and Ubuntu also going with that crap "Unity" is many reason why to use Linux Mint. They have no plans on moving to either Gnome Shell or that crap interface Unity.

Give it a shot

For that matter I am planning to use Debian Stable for a while. But after that?